Alexander

With kids, it’s more like 20 seconds or 4 minutes, still as risky

That’s a way to say I’ve got PhD without saying I’ve got PhD.

Where I live now, having more that one lane is a luxury few places could afford. I still slow down and move towards shoulder if I see The Secret Hints (those funny blinky yellow lights that do not seem to work in many, many cars).

Hah, when I lived in the US, I was 100% certain that if a road has limit, I can always, in worst imaginable conditions, just nail it and go with limit (I lived down south, ok, in Texas, but traveled all the thing).

Now in Europe this is absolutely not the case. I don’t mean Autobahns even, just regular roads in Finland are, well, just slow down if not sure, ok?

yes, it’s about 5km/h lower than what panel says, I use GPS to fuel my ego! This bike is not made for speed.

I can drive fast and pull 4wd cars from snow with this car (I pulled dudes on RAMs from Grand Canyon snowy roads with 2010 Corolla), I just don’t want to.

Yeah, that’s me on Prius, driving deliberately not above speed limit to laugh at your funny face when you pass and then not shine my high lights at you feeling moral superiority.

Well, in Finland, this kind of setup is deeply default. It becomes the main power consumer in November though.

DIY

Was thinking about this very topic, although I plan to catch wind.

So far the best ideas I’ve got are:

1. Scavenge old Toyota hybrid Ni batteries - those are surprisingly reliable long after they are not giving enough power for a car, and have quite good charge-discharge capacity
2. Build Fe-Ni base batteries - messy but cheap
3. Switch part of equipment to compressed air, run compressor for storage, spin generator with air on demand, possibly bubble air through some kind of bioreactor (kelp, mushrooms, etc.). Maybe same thing with vacuum line.
4. Electrochemical synthesis on spare power (pretty much open battery loop; just a little bit - by making materials to be used in non-rechargeable batteries - or completely - make something useful elsewhere like metal coatings; I could extract stuff from local minerals, or barrety broth, or some kind of local goblinite). Anyway, something that wouldn’t care about random schedule, as opposed to, for example, greenhouse lighting or heating.

Home power storage is very hard to design. Ballpark-wise, I found that energy storage could be as profitable as renting space for living, normalized by square meter; thus it’s bound to be at least about as expensive to run. If possible, you should consider making smart grid with neighbours.

I had this story when we’ve picked peaches on pick-your-own farm near Dallas, to make melomel (turned out awesome), and while we were busy, some flies ate skin on our ankles, that took almost a year to heal. Now we moved to Finland and some similar gnats are trying to eat all the skin, this season starts now. Well, skin adopts and learns to heal faster.

There was another pick your own farm in Arkansas, we went there for strawberries (to - you guess it, make melomel!) And when we told the farmer what we are up to, he was like “that’s cool, but you know, be careful telling this to people. You know, this is baptist country” - which made us make jokes about baptist spray. We had a barrel of mead at the end of first stage of fermentation to throw berries in right away reducing contaminant growth time and made sure we leave before a local school kids arrive to pick more berries. Good times. In the morning the fog was so heavy, I detuned radio and pretended it’s Silent Hill.

But there is another story I heard from a friend. Her granddad retired after a career of chemical factory boss. So he bought a hectare of land and decided to grow black currants. You can take chem engineer out of factory, but… He got hundreds of bushes, and assigned them to family members. They had KPI, deadlines, whole deal turned into awful grind with corporate stench. And what would one do with some cubic meters of rapidly decaying berries anyway? They ate it, canned it, made wine (not very good one), needless to say, nobody in the family could stand black currants anymore. How did this surface? I took her bf to get some beer for the party in store and there was this single blackcurrant ipa. I was like - here, she’ll like it, it’s sure bet. Well, it wasn’t, lol.

There is nothing subjective here, it’s knowledge of biochemistry and manufacturers use of good practices. Of cousre, this is impossible on large scale production, yet you could be sure that your local milk providers milk will just become something else upon curdling, and your local butchery vacuum sealed bags are as clean from pathogens as their line and are good far beyond expiration date, but will change. And that things were stored correctly and are not blooming with thermophiles inside. I do not mean nutritional content, I only address industrial labeling and its purpose. And things that could not possibly be regulated, and have to rely on community (in many forms, from “lets love each other” to “I will break your face if you burn me, pal”). Eating expired stuff is an act of trust, whether it is trust to chance and supernatural, or trust of community that builds cultural value, is a whole different question.

Then you can always inoculate food yourself before expiration, but then it counts as cooking I guess.

There is no “expired”, only “improperly fermented”. Sure, it could be very bad, but then you should’ve paid attention to it in advance, respect the nutrient and all living things who brought it about.

Something along the lines of “hiring heavy equipment, then buying a ticket to the gym, everytime you need this done because you never learned anything else”. My neighbours tell me I need heavy equipment to fell my forest, absolutely not, I’ll go on foot, respect and fell every single tree I plan to fell, leave no tracks, become stronger and wiser, all for free.

Heavy equipment is not cheap, too, especially if you need an operator with skill comparable with attention to small details that manual laborers have naturally. And it does not spread virally like skills. And it burns carbon and leaves tracks. It has its uses at scale, but not in pilots. Same thing everywhere: I have a pick-and-place robot to assemble my electronics, not even turning it on before I have at least 100-ish boards to assemble; it’s not expensive, it’s easier than manual labor - but you’ve got to know the system you build before giving it away to a machine, or you’ll have a long and expensive debug session ahead of you, even if you are certain know everything about it, which is totally not the case here.

Cheap difraction gratings though, indispensable

Probably by rice, or koji. Or yeast!

They might have switched to diffractive optics to combine lens and diffuser in one structure. I was anticipating to see it in newer small embedded screens, but haven’t encountered anything like this yet. You might peel some of whatever peels off on the side and see if there is periodic pattern underneath or just more of same.

Awesome! I once (more than 10 years ago, wow) had an idea to attach solar heater to vacuum/gas CVD system to make graphene, but my PI at the time said it’s dumb idea, sure it will work, no novelty there. Now I have no idea why I would want to make graphene, and pass all the free lenses in second hand shops. Now if making the forge is feasible (I had doubts), I’m totally doing it too, in Finland!